Gilles-Gaston Granger (January 28, 1920- August 24, 2016) was a French philosopher who contributed to philosophy of social sciences, philosophy of logic and mathematics, and history of philosophy, writing on philosophers such as Aristotle, Condorcet, Bolzano, and Wittgenstein. Interested in the variety of methods underlying scientific reasoning, he created in 1964, developed and directed until 1986 the Center for Comparative Epistemology at the University of Aix-en Provence. Elected in 1986 at College de France with a chair of the same name, he has left a substantial bibliography including nineteen books and one hundred and fifty articles. His work has been translated in nine languages.

Gaston Granger was born and grew up in Paris. His father was a carpenter. His mother and younger sister both died from tuberculosis when he was still a toddler. Given his excellent results in primary school, he was encouraged to become a school teacher, a cursus which, at the time, did not require a baccalaureate. One of his father's clients, however, himself a Professor, understood that the young man had exceptional intellectual talents. Thanks to his help, young Granger was admitted to Lycée Henri IV, and became in 1940 a student in the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure. He passionately attended Jean Cavaillès' seminar until the latter was arrested as a resistant in August 1942. Cavaillès' work on the Philosophy of Mathematics may have motivated him and his classmate Jules Vuillemin to study mathematics. Along with other ENS students who opposed force labour in Germany, however, he had to leave ENS to join a Resistance group in Creuse in 1943. After the war, he kept his resistant code name of Gilles.

He was nominated in 1947 Professor of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo, where he taught and published articles in Portuguese. Nominated in the University of Rennes (France) in 1955, he defended a State Doctoral thesis comprising two books about Economic Methodology and the Social Mathematics of Condorcet.

On line with these works, his next major opus, Formal Thought and the Sciences of Man (1960), deals with the mathematical models that contribute to formalization in the human sciences. It is based on the transcendental claim that mathematics have an a priori role in producing scientific knowledge. Scientific objectification is seen as a symbolic process through which what Grangerwill later call "formal contents" are generated. Scrutinized from the viewpoint of science in the making, the computational properties of the languages of science across fields of inquiry (linguistics, economics, psychology) are emphasized as reflecting specific rational practices of interest to the philosopher of science.

After two years spent in Congo as a Director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Central Africa, he was nominated Professor at the University of Aix-en Provence in 1964. Within a few years, he managed to set up an active research group. As a "Center for Comparative Epistemology", it specialized in the study of the modes of knowledge production across scientific fields, with a strong emphasis on the philosophy of mathematics and logic. With its research seminar and his library, this CNRS-funded unit would soon attract students and researchers from around the world, in particular from Canada, where Granger has been a regular guest speaker and invited Professor. A major event organized in 1969 by the Center was the Conference entitled "Wittgenstein and the problem of the philosophy of science". That same year, Granger published a book on Wittgenstein, followed, much later, by a translation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Granger's Essay on the Philosophy of Style, published in 1968, highlights stylistic variations in the formal analysis of magnitude, geometry, vectors, linguistic, and action theory. These variations are seen as the proper object of philosophy, whose goal is to interpret individual ways of construing the relation between form and content. Philosophical knowledge is now seen as intimately linked to the exploration of stylistic comparisons between scientific modelizations. Pour une Connaissance Philosophique, published in 1988, develops further the concept of philosophical knowledge as an interpretive endeavour, focussing on the stylistic variations and their specific types of formal contents.

From 1986 to 1990, Granger held the chair of Comparative Epistemology at College de France. He authored no less that eight more books after his retirement. Gilles Granger was Doctor Honoris Causa of the Universities of São Paulo, (Brazil) and Sherbrook (Canada). He has exerted a deep influence on his students and colleagues. Two books have been devoted to his work.

Georg Kreisel (September 15, 1923 in Graz – March 1, 2015 in Salzburg) was an Austrian-born mathematical logician who studied and worked in Great Britain and America. Kreisel came from a Jewish background; his family sent him to England before the Anschluss, where he studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge and then, during World War II, worked on military subjects. After the war he returned to Cambridge and received his doctorate. He taught at the University of Reading until 1954 and then worked at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1955 to 1957. Subsequently he taught at Stanford University and the University of Paris. Kreisel was appointed a professor at Stanford University in 1962 and remained on the faculty there until he retired in 1985.

Kreisel worked in various areas of logic, and especially in proof theory, where he is known for his so-called "unwinding" program, whose aim was to extract constructive content from superficially non-constructive proofs.

Kreisel was elected to the Royal Society in 1966; Kreisel remained a close friend of Francis Crick whom he had met in the Royal Navy during WWII.

While a student at Cambridge, Kreisel was the student most respected by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ray Monk writes, "In 1944--when Kreisel was still only twenty-one--Wittgenstein shocked Rush Rhees by declaring Kreisel to be the most able philosopher he had ever met who was also a mathematician."

Kreisel was also a close friend of the Anglo-Irish philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. They met at Cambridge in 1947 during Murdoch's year of study there. Peter Conradi reports that Murdoch transcribed Kreisel's letters into her journals over the next fifty years. According to Conradi, "For half a century she nonetheless records variously Kreisel's brilliance, wit and sheer 'dotty' solipsistic strangeness, his amoralism, cruelty, ambiguous vanity and obscenity." Murdoch dedicated her 1971 novel An Accidental Manto Kreisel and he became a (partial) model for several characters in other novels, including Marcus Vallar in The Message to the Planetand Guy Openshaw in Nuns and Soldiers.

On the 4th of October, 2017, we heard the sad news that AIPS member Jesús Mosterín passed away. He was a highly relevant intellectual in the Spanish milieu, and well known abroad for his contributions to the philosophy of cosmology and biology. It seems not too far-fetched to say that he was a Spanish Russell: a logician by training, founder of the Barcelona group in logic, who unfolded his talent and opened up his interests to a much broader range of issues, becoming a public figure. His views were always marked by a rational, objectivist approach to the questions at stake, which earned him a reputation of being ‘a rationalist.’ But he was, more than that, a thinker of life, of the value of life.

Jesús Mosterín died of cancer caused by exposition to asbestos, an illness about which he spoke openly and with great lucidity two years ago (‘Una cita con la parca’, El País, March 2015). Lucidity is indeed something that comes naturally to mind when speaking of Jesús – an enlightened attitude, an openness of mind without dogmas, but with great rational demands.

He began studying mathematical logic in Germany, Münster, before coming back to Spain and settling in Barcelona. After 1996, he would abandon the Univ. of Barcelona and become a member of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC). In his early phase, as professor at Barcelona and founder of its logic group, he published texts on elementary logic, on set theory, on second-order logic. But during the 1970s some experiences would change his life and orientation. He started working for the editorial house Salvat and collaborating with renowned naturalist Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente in the publication of an encyclopaedia of animal life, Fauna. This would lead to a life-long engagement with related topics, including his opposition to bullfighting, reflections on the question of animal rights, and the presidency of Proyecto Gran Simio (Great Ape). He wrote books such as ¡Vivan los animales!, A favor de los toros, El triunfo de la compasión, El reino de los animales and El derecho de los animales, as well as many papers on these issues, thus becoming a well known public figure in these debates in Spain and Latin America.

As he wrote, “It is in our hands to take on the role of lucid guardians of the biosphere, or else abdicate our responsibility and become drunken witnesses of the disaster that we ourselves are causing.” En nuestras manos está asumir nuestro papel de guardianes lúcidos de la biosfera, o abdicar de nuestra responsabilidad y asistir como testigos borrachos al desastre que nosotros mismos estamos provocando.

The expansion of Mosterín’s range of interests had become clear in 1978 with the publication of Racionalidad y acción humana (several editions up to 2008). In this and other works, such as Filosofía de la cultura, his approach was marked by a highly interdisciplinary perspective, combining ideas from science with philosophical reflections. In his approach to culture, e.g., he liked to emphasize the different forms of cultural life in animals, concluding that we are not the only cultural animal. This line of work culminated with the publication in 2006 of La naturaleza humana, a book in which Mosterín fights to establish the great role of biological traits in human life and behaviour, against philosophical (or other) attempts to insist on the indeterminacy of the human.

Special mention deserves his Spanish edition of Kurt Gödel, Obras completas (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1981, 2006), uniting in a single volume all published works of Gödel, which came out before the English edition of collected works prepared by Feferman. And more recently the edition of Rudolf Carnap’s Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Axiomatik, prepared with Thomas Bonk (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000).

A particularly relevant contribution to the literature in philosophy of physics is the paper written jointly with J. Earman, A critical look at inflationary cosmology. Philos. Sci.66 (1999), no. 1, 1–49.

The Spanish-speaking literature in philosophy of science is indebted to Mosterín for a very relevant reference book, the lengthy Diccionario de Lógica y Filosofía de la Ciencia, written in collaboration with Roberto Torretti (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2002; second edn. 2010). But there are many other contributions that could be mentioned here, among which I shall mention the book Conceptos y teorías en la ciencia (3rd edn, 2000). Los lógicos (2000, 2007), which offers highly readable presentations of the life and work of key figures in the history of modern logic – Frege, Russell, Cantor, Gödel, von Neumann, Turing. And the collection of papers Ciencia viva: Reflexiones sobre la aventura intelectual de nuestro tiempo (2001, 2006).

All of these works have gone through two or more editions, which is a clear indication of the public following of Mosterín’s well-informed, clear and insightful discussions of intellectual topics.

Patrick Colonel Suppes (/ˈsʊpɪs/; March 17, 1922 – November 17, 2014) was an American philosopher who made significant contributions to philosophy of science, the theory of measurement, the foundations of quantum mechanics, decision theory, psychology and educational technology. He was the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University and until January 2010 was the Director of the Education Program for Gifted Youth also at Stanford.

Suppes was born on March 17, 1922, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He grew up as an only child, later with a half brother George who was born in 1943 after Patrick had entered the army. His grandfather, C.E. Suppes, had moved to Oklahoma from Ohio. Suppes' father and grandfather were independent oil men. His mother died when he was a young boy. He was raised by his stepmother, who married his father before he was six years old. His parents did not have much formal education.

Suppes began college at the University of Oklahoma in 1939, but transferred to the University of Chicago in his second year, citing boredom with intellectual life in Oklahoma as his primary motivation. In his third year, at the insistence of his family, Suppes attended the University of Tulsa, majoring in physics, before entering the Army Reserves in 1942. In 1943 he returned to the University of Chicago and graduated with a B.S. in meteorology, and was stationed shortly thereafter at the Solomon Islands to serve during World War II.

Suppes was discharged from the Army Air Force in 1946. In January 1947 he entered Columbia University as a graduate student in philosophy as a student of Ernest Nagel and received a PhD in 1950. In 1952 he went to Stanford University, and from 1959 to 1992 he was the director of the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences (IMSSS). (He was later to become the Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Stanford.

In the 1960s Suppes and Richard C. Atkinson (the future president of the University of California) conducted experiments in using computers to teach math and reading to schoolchildren in the Palo Alto area. Stanford's Education Program for Gifted Youth and Computer Curriculum Corporation (CCC, now named Pearson Education Technologies) are indirect descendants of those early experiments. At Stanford, Suppes was instrumental in encouraging the development of high-technology companies that were springing up in the field of educational software up into the 1990s, (such as Bien Logic).

One computer used in Suppes and Atkinson's Computer-assisted Instruction (CAI) experiments was the specialized IBM 1500 Instructional System. Seeded by a research grant in 1964 from the U.S. Department of Education to the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford University, the IBM 1500 CAI system was initially prototyped at the Brentwood Elementary School (Ravenswood City School District) in East Palo Alto, California by Suppes. The students first used the system in 1966.

During the 1950s and 1960s Suppes collaborated with Donald Davidson on decision theory, at Stanford. Their initial work followed lines of thinking which had been anticipated in 1926 by Frank P. Ramsey, and involved experimental testing of their theories, culminating in the 1957 monograph Decision Making: An Experimental Approach. Such commentators as Kirk Ludwig trace the origins of Davidson's theory of radical interpretation to his formative work with Suppes.

In 1965 he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences for his work on mathematical psychology.

On November 13, 1990, President George H. W. Bush awarded Suppes with the prestigious President's National Medal of Science for work in Behavioral and Social Science.

In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is the laureate of the 2003 Lakatos Award for his contributions to the philosophy of science.